Neanderthals and humans lived side by side in Northern Europe 45,000 years ago
phys.org
phys.org
(As a male homo sapiens, I have to say that if Neanderthal women looked like this [0], they may have looked a bit strange, but certainly not repelling or un-human.)
[0] https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/scifindr/articles/image2s...
I played with and interacted with chimpanzees quite a few times around Africa [1], and spent hundreds of hours watching them and just chilling while they ate, slept and played.
Sitting face to face with a large chimp on your lap is an incredible experience, and watching their facial expressions, emotions and reactions while checking out their fingerprints and having them groom your beard is a very powerful experience.
To my very core I had the feeling we are them and they are us.
Spending time with gorillas was cool too [2], but I didn't exactly play with them!
Even the little ones ran over to me and held up their arms for "pick me up!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juyvnVL6V7g
>Humans are the apex predator. Not an apex predator. The apex predator. Other than a handful of bacteria and viruses, there’s pretty much nothing stronger, more intelligent, or more adaptable than Homo sapiens
On a couple of occasions, I dated women who were considerably taller than me. One of them had a very big, toothy smile, and liked to wear horns when she went to Renaissance festivals. I used to call her my "wild thing," in reference to the Maurice Sendak book.
EDIT: Come to think of it, there's Robert Crumb's drawings of his getting piggyback rides with his wife at the time. Kind of similar in spirit.
Differences within Sapiens are a thing too and we don't really notice them most of the time: https://www.boredpanda.com/tall-people-problems-japan/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Neanderthals, Sapiens, and other close relatives like Denisovans could serve as analogues of fantasy races, like elves, dwarves, and hobbits. Non Neanderthals and Sapiens would have to be on the rare side to explain how they haven't been discovered today, but the fact that the entire region was submerged helps with that.
Perhaps certain factors could have made the region extremely prosperous by standards of the time and a nexus of prehistoric trade, giving rise to a rich culture attaining legendary status. However, none of its architecture used stone, and all of its knowledge was carried through oral tradition.
Here's a great video that goes into the overlap between species and possible reasons for the others' demise.
Also - check out this (sorry for spamming it, but its relevant to so many comments): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juyvnVL6V7g
Humans are the apex predator. Not an apex predator. The apex predator. Other than a handful of bacteria and viruses, there’s pretty much nothing stronger, more intelligent, or more adaptable than Homo sapiens.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-705a3f3ef5c510706161f...
Also, I once had a single piece of hair that turned from fully black to fully white back to fully black in a span of maybe a dozen cm. And a few strands that turn orange-reddish, all for no apparent reason.
Though I'm just guessing this is related, maybe it's pure chance.
It's social conditioning and ego doing it's thing to create pointless suffering/insecurity as usual. Nothing new. It will keep creating suffering for pointless things. The dna % just one of the mere labels it uses.
Will you send a child to prison for crimes committed by their parents if the parents ended up dead by the time found guilty?
Human brains seem wired to have strong feelings about their kin or tribe. So, yes, I would think having neutral feelings about your parents would be a hard thing to understand for most people.
VENTER: [Clinton's] genome is obviously totally unique, but all of our genomes are. There is this three percent difference. We got an honorary degree together a few years back. And he was the speaker. He said he learned from me that he was 4 percent Neanderthal and that explained all the problems he had in the White House.
(LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: It is true, you know. [...]
BURNETT: So, you're the maximum Neanderthal?
(LAUGHTER)
CLINTON: I don't know, when I'm told -- Hillary this wasn't surprised.
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ebo/date/2015-09-29/segment...
Neanderthals got a similar wrap. Early ethnocentrists believed that what succeeds in time succeeds in quality, but from all modern evidence, you share ancestry with a more developed, intelligent race than most.
No guarantees you inherited any of those qualities, but still :)
Accurately recounting history is also the only way we can learn from it. If you turn a group into mindless evil idiots, then there's little to learn from such. But when you appreciate that there were real issues and awful acts that, in turn, drove no less awful responses from otherwise rationale and intelligent individuals behaving in what they felt was justifiable ways, in a sort of endless pendulum of death and destruction, until there was just one side left standing - it suddenly becomes strikingly similar to modern times in many ways, and there's yet much to learn from it all.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_William_Henry
From Genesis 6:4
> The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
Some higher power or the inscrutable workings of evolution and planetary change, spared us.
Adam / Eve => first Homosapiens, but this doesn't mean Neanderthals weren't already around.
From the blurb: "...Neanderthal Predation (NP) theory reveals that Neanderthals were 'apex' predators - who resided at the top of the food chain, and everything else - including humans - was their prey..."
https://www.amazon.com/Them-Us-Neanderthal-predation-created...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juyvnVL6V7g
Talks about how we conquered over them for the most part.
You can see people looking more or less "neanderthal" in different times and places, even within the short period of photographic evidence. The difference is environmental.
Anyway, the main difference that distingueshes sapiens is the poorly grown face, and there is no known reason why people should evolve an ungrown face.
Also, GATTACA is a gem of a movie.
Regarding your particular point about identifying "neanderthal DNA", consider that most genes are made up of thousands of base pairs. Even though there might be individual variation, it is trivial to distinguish between, say, chimpanzee and human versions of certain genes based on what we know about the populations. We also know the rate of evolution of genes and how they diverge, which means we can be pretty sure that a given version was acquired through interbreeding versus spontaneous mutation.
Native Americans look very neandertalish in old photos, and even older drawings suggest that they used to look even more so. The difference is so stark that they were believed to have been pretty much exterminated, until DNA showed that they probably joined the Spanish, and their descendants now call themselves "Mexicans"... When they adopted European lifestyle, they started looking almost white.
Or the Chinese. Slanted eyes used to be seen as the defining feature of Chinese people. Almost no modern Chinese have slanted eyes today. It can still be seen occasionally in people who came from some isolated place in Western China, or something like that, but it seems absurd that something so rare could make it into a stereotype.
Too much weight is put on genes. I think it's somebody's nice fantasy that we solve all our problems through gene editing, but it isn't so.
But over the decades of research into this field, scientists have had exactly this discussion about where to draw the line between "species" of Homo and have various standards for making this distinction, though certainly some of them disagree with the general consensus, and things change over time.
But there's plenty of genetic evidence and research that have gone into these findings, and plenty of Neanderthal genes that don't appear in modern humans. Just because it goes against your gut intuition doesn't mean they are wrong to make this distinction. There are decades of literature on the topic if you are actually interested in learning about it.
So foxes and dogs/wolves are distinct because, while clearly very related, their chromosomes are factored differently (haploid numbers), whereas wolves and dogs and coyotes are all compatible, for examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#/media/File:Ho...
I think this image explains it pretty well. You can see they branch off, and then kind of get absorbed.
Neanderthals were the superior species and hunted humans into hiding. A global cataclysm occurred, devastating the food supply available to Neanderthals who required more fuel. Humans survived, only barely, because the few who survived on the run had acclimated to living in underground caves.
Sometime in the next few centuries, another cataclysm will occur, wiping out the surface dwelling human species.
Dolphins inherit the earth, and one day look back at the “primitive human species” that clearly gave way to the “superior” dolphin.
The end.
Superior, is good enough adapted to circumstances. Evolution turns your blood into anti-freeze as a inherited sickness, and this bug is a feature near the arctic. For the rest of the planet you are a very sick fish.
Imagine a water-world, with one volcano caldera above water. In that volcano caldera there is a geysir, and th at geysir, keeps a giant diamond ball rolling, since the dawn of time.
Evolution is not a refree, rewarding smartness or excellence. It just a process rewarding even foolish adaptions, in my example, the ability to become flat and squeeze into rift and cracks. It also rewards cultural taboos, like sticking your flatworm head up and wonder at the sky.
So superior, the word, assumes the idea of progress, of going forth towards the end of history, that the process can not crash and get stuck in a million years looping till the sun goes out. And that "getting stuck" is a very real thing, a very real danger, a "reasonable" voice from the gut, to return to reliable roots and thrust your "gut-instincts."
and Homo sapiens sapiens
Neanderthals are Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
They did go extinct ? [rather than heavily interbred to make European Sapiens, unlike, say Latinos, which, in addition to their Native American "base", have quite a lot (~20% ?) of European ancestry (and even more culture)]
The most interbred Homo Sapiens individual(s?) we found, that lived (very roughly) around the disappearance of Neanderthals has only 6-9% of Neanderthal DNA.
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-an...
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/25658429/4537386...
And this typically falls to 1-4% for other non-African Sapiens (and even lower for African ones).
(Though, I have no idea about the Neanderthal culture influences on Sapiens culture ?)
(Also, in case this needs a reminder : Neanderthals were our descendants.)
What? You can't just conflate culture or place of origin with ancestry.
Plenty of what you call "Latino" people have zero native american ancestry.
And I did mention culture, and how it might be different. Also, how do you NOT conflate "place of origin" with culture and/or ancestry, after all, memes and especially genes spread most effectively by proximity. (Especially before the modern era).
Also, this extremely strong claim of yours sounds dubious to me, any examples of self-described Latinos with actually zero native american ancestry ? As proved by either reliable and comprehensive family trees going back to the middle ages, or DNA analysis ?
Anyway, my point was that the current population of (especially Southern and Central) Americas is a result of heavy genetic (and cultural) mixing of Europeans and Americans, while the same thing doesn't seem to have happened for Sapiens and Neanderthal (roughly, then Africans and then Europeans ?), at least genetically (any clues for the culture ??)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Latin_Americans
Case in point, me - my ancestors fled Europe in the early 20th century to a Latin American country due to lack of work, famine, wars and whatnot. One of them was Spanish, so by definition, I have Hispanic blood. Zero native american ancestry. You will see that this is a very common situation for many Latin Americans.
For more examples, see the Brazilian government whitening policy right that happened after slavery abolition. Lots of Europeans (Italians, Germans, Poles, Spaniards, Portuguese, etc) were brought to work in plantations and to decrease the relative % of the newly freed Black population.
When miscegenation happened, it was with Black people, as the Native Brazilian population was already decimated by this point.
This also happened in other countries, like Argentina.